It's Turk to Me

“YOHHHG-JIAH! YOOHHHHGG-JI-AHHH!”

That was one of many street cries we’d hear—some daily, some less frequent; some intruding through the curtained glass-wall front, straight into our second-floor apartment, but others faint and far off like a distant train whistle.

We were living in Turkey then—it was the mid-Fifties—in the old, old Aegean coastal city known as Smyrna for well over three thousand years, one of Christianity’s original “Seven Churches of Asia (Minor),” with another, Ephesus, just down the road. In 1900, say, the city was still a generally peaceful mix of young Turks migrating from the dusty countryside; longtime resident Greeks, many of them well-to-do merchants; and a small colony of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain hundreds of years before.

But in the post-Ataturk nation--more secular, with most Arabic connections denied, and a new Westernized Turkish alphabet and language created--the city’s name had been modernized by deleting the end syllable and adding a new beginning (was it perhaps symbolic?), creating the harsher-sounding urban destination “Izmir.”

The population for this major seaport city, spreading out from a sweeping crescent of harbor, was already around 300,000 by then, but has since expanded explosively to four million and counting. The sounds and street shouts we heard are drowned in traffic noise now—a great clatter and clamor… fewer cries and whispers.

The called-out, cajoling offers of the horse-drawn carriage drivers (who occasionally came riding to the rescue of threatened young Americans) have given way to honking, tires-squealing taxicabs. The music drifting from windows and doorways sounds generic Western now, rather than harem-shrill Turkish or the haunted strains drawn from bluesy Greek rembetika. (Early singer Rita Abadzi was a Smyrna native.) Muezzins high in the minarets today need loudspeakers to call the

faithful to prayer, where their voices in older times, rising and falling rhythmically, were alone sufficient.

The old Bazaar, a dark, crowded maze of shops and stalls, coffee houses and blind alleyways, still exists, but now selling machine-made rugs and cheap gimcrack knockoffs from China instead of brass bells and camel saddles and coffee thick as sludge. The camel trains hauling trade goods are gone, and the beautiful pebble-front, two- and three-story apartment buildings—lost in the rush of Metro trains and a modern international airport, and the crush of massive eight-floor, Soviet-style housing blocs that push out in all directions.

Revisiting Izmir 30 years later in 1986, the only wandering street vendors I saw involved parked-all-day handcarts with young guys boredly hawking shishkebabs, or the Turkish equivalent of gyro wraps, or melting ice cream. Long gone, it seemed, were the whistling knife sharpener with his foot-pedal grindstone wheel, and the old man singing out his willingness to gather all your discarded books and newspapers, and the big-voiced vegetable seller busy letting everyone within a two-block radius know which fruits and vegetables were fresh that day and right there for sale on his produce-piled-high wagon pulled by a rough-and-ready horse.

My own favorite, back in the fondly remembered Izmir of the Fifties, was the peripatetic yoghurt seller, roaming the city with a heavy yoke on his shoulders and two big buckets dangling down, hollering out “YOOGGHHJIAH” and slower, stretched-out variations of the same. You could buy a small paper-cup’s worth or fill up your kitchen container, and the only flavoring came from a honey jar he carried along too. Rich, creamy, and with the honey, a treat nearly as special as ice cream…

So here we are today, going on three decades farther on, and the supermarkets and TV ads of the wider world tout, not just yoghurt, but specifically Greek yoghurt.

Huh? What makes this yoghurt Greek? The goats or cows or, I don’t know, penned sheep maybe, deliver the same milk wherever they are (barring agriculture conditions), and they don’t recognize national boundaries. In fact, I think they graze on any available grass-without-borders.

I also sampled and examined single-serving containers from a couple of different U.S. companies and found some data of interest. One offers Greek yoghurt (“Greek style,” they say) originating in Montlake Terrace, Washington; and another hails from New Berlin(!), New York. One calls itself “The Greek Gods” (Pomegranate represents

Apollo), while the other bears the distinctly non-Greek brand name Chobani. And if the Greeks do have a process for their word (extra straining to insure less liquid and more protein), the Japanese-sounding, German settlement, Greek-insistent product has 3g of Fat, 160 calories, and 14g of Protein, while the “stylin’” one’s same-size serving holds 17g Fat, 230 calories, and 6g Protein. (In comparison here’s a plain, unGreek yoghurt with 0g Fat, 120 calories, and 12g Protein; tastes just fine with a dab of honey.) Both brands offer a mild and tasty product enhanced by fruit flavoring, or some fruit jam in the bottom of the cup meant to be stirred up into the unflavored yoghurt.

Which of these is more faithfully, maybe poetically, Greek? It’s true that the Greek

people suffered occasionally when the Ottoman Turks ruled a vast, lazy, Eastern Mediterranean empire that included Greece--and then more certainly, murderously so, in 1922 when Ataturk’s army drove the Greeks residing in Izmir and elsewhere literally into the Aegean Sea. But the yoghurts of both lands are very much the same. Only paid company scientists and (m)ad men and women care to define (or invent) such specious claims.

Yoghurt from a streetseller in Izmir 50-some years ago vs. yoghurt sold in Seattle today? I suppose it's a wash, aside from advances in sterilizing and mass producing,

but my memory says different. That yoghurt cup you’re pretending makes for a yummy lunch? Well, it may be Greek to you, but it’s Turk to me.

But better yet might be the world remembering that yoghurt too is Gaian first. One world… one yoghurt.

* * * * *
It occurred to me today (three days post-post) that I missed a chance to more deftly make the point (split infinitive be hanged). So...

Insisting that Greek yoghurt somehow tastes better than Turkish is tantamount to claiming that Jewish olives grown "inside" the infamous barrier Wall taste better than Palestinian ones grown on the other side... when what the two sides really need is for one or the other to offer an olive branch.

Got Me in Its Spell

Some damn slice of Spam shows up on my computer almost daily, for a nothing called Magic Jack; never opened a message so I have no idea what that is, nor do I care. But that word “Magic” has been haunting my brain like the words to some familiar song.

As a result, lately I’ve been thinking and remembering… magic sets and birthday magic shows, a happy family staple of mid-20th century America; King Arthur’s mentor Merlin perennially revived in books and movies; Sinatra’s versions of “Witchcraft” and “That Old Black Magic”; Ingmar Bergman’s superb black-and-white film starring a youngish Max von Sydow as The Magician, and the recent, and decent, bit of full-color trickery called The Illusionist; innumerable novels of the world incorporating anything-may-happen “magic realism,” versus John Fowles’

creepy Greek Isles sojourn titled The Magus; the ubiquitous wizards and fannish wannabes brought together by mania for the Harry Potter saga and The Lord of the Rings; the inescapable illusions of Houdini and his modern-day descendants, the “Davids” and “Chrises” appearing and disappearing near us all.

Among the hundreds of references and memories circling in my brain, one stands starkly lit and alone, a late-Seventies television commercial. Ridiculous that such a thing can still command one’s attention (anything short of Kate Upton engulfing a burger, anyway!) 35 years later, but such is the case. And from that case, his special holding cell, comes the scary ventriloquist’s dummy of the thriller flick

simply titled Magic (starring Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret).

The dummy, in a tightening close-up of its neck and head, a continuous 30-second shot, mockingly intones a scary bit of verse, something along the lines of:

Corpses are blue,
Blood is red;
Magic is fun…
You’re dead.

Then the eyes roll up in its head, and End.

Whoa, Nelly! That one hit me straight on, and it was just as disquieting the few times I caught it again. But Magic the film pretty much stiffed, and the commercial vanished into the graveyard of dead TV spots. Yet the memory lingers on… (It’s possible that I’m misremembering the verse recited. In a 30-second You Tube upload the dummy practically smacks its lips saying, “Hocus pocus, We take her to bed; Magic is fun, We’re dead.” But I like my version better, seems more likely to have satisfied the television censors of 1978!)

Anyway, such were the forms of magic lurking in my head when I wrote this odd poem many years later…

Svengalied

She vanished me. Now you see

me nought. A mesmer’d man,
a cache of bewilderment, I was
convenience of coyntage only.

What began as parlor tricks—
my slide of hands upon her
sequined gown, and nothing
up my sleeve—became a mixed

preponderance, a legerdemain
of lust, and I masterfully mis-
directed. Pick a night, any
night, any night at all; feigned

rings linked, fingers palming
balls, miraculous escapes.
Found coin did multiply her
‘til she worked my enabling

cards with a consummate skill;
no one discerned the mage
in her rough magic… (Oh, teller
ensorcelled! Oh, Circean tale!)

For as I too quickly learned,
the trick is sold when the trick

is told. Wands become wilted
flowers; fair-color silks turn

mourning doves; and love dis-
appears up its own frayed rope
once the abracadabras have
all been said, and no rabbits

in the rigged hat remain. My
heart is black stone now
without illusions, much harder
words unpenned--who’d deny

such grievance?--as I saw my
self in half, my voice thrown
far, full past some dummy man-
drake’s raw unsevered cords.

* * * *
Hoist with his own petard? Maybe... so long as you know that petard does not mean "rope."

Chips, Grits, and Mother Wit

So-called “Reality TV shows” (real? Oh, really?) are considered a guilty pleasure by many of those who watch. Personally I find them cheap and tawdry, and an insult to participants and watchers alike. (Tromp the Donald! Too much American Idol makes idle Americans! Housewives, househusbands, re-unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains… and cable!)

Born of a Hollywood writers’ strike as I recall, they have now grown like a topsy-turvy set of Tribbles, and beneath all the interactive ballyhoo and brief celebrityhood lie a different sort of cheapening, and the cutting of work staff, and a domestic sort of outsourcing--a crafty thumbing of the nose at unions: “No need for all those expensive writers and theatrical directors and set builders; we’ll save a boatload by just paying the fools we

follow around.”

But I have my own guilty pleasure these days… the fictional, scripted, actual-actors weekly TV series called Hart of Dixie, about a darn-Yankee dame named Zoe Hart--a cute, too-clever-by-half doctor; a surgeon, even--who takes up residence in some near-Gulf Coast town between New Orleans and Mobile (approximately), eager to “fit in,” but too opinionated to accept the Southern characters as they are. (Zoe seems not to have learned the lessons of Reconstruction!)

That’s enough about the show. It’s intermittently funny and vaguely scenic (the cutaway shots, that is; the bulk of each episode is likely taped on a Hollywood set). I watch mostly because it reminds me of my mother and her rural Georgia family and upbringing; her occasional Southern-belle ways, too. Mom was vivacious and

beautiful, a heartbreaker no doubt, and she could be gracious or imperious, friendly or snippy, generous or mean--sometimes all of that in the course of a half hour in her usually charming company! She was moody, subject to migraine vapors, more Conservative than our Dad, the Illinois-born Air Force officer.

My sisters and I learned Emily Post manners and military deference, to show proper respect and to say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” and “Thank you,”and mean it. Home Ec. major Mom told us often that people in India were starving, so we cleared our plates, at the table and off to the sink afterwards. But the parents also raised us to think for ourselves, and then regretted it when all three children grew up to be Left radicals at college and forever after… They loved us, but weren't sure what to make of us.

But before that, we lived for a few years in parts of Texas, and we learned about border Mexican food long before mass immigration and excited tastebuds made "Cinco de Mayo" celebrants out of regular meat-and-potatoes Yankees. We

learned to eat all sorts of root vegetables and a good-for-you mess o’ greens too, spicy New Orleans cooking (“Where’s that dang Tabasco bottle?”) and both high and low on the hog, with special attention to fried okra and--of course--grits.

Crispy crawdads, better known as “Cajun popcorn”? Pshaw. Like mother’s milk to a budding Louisianan. Pecan pralines from some branded and candied pit-stop en route from Here’bouts to Over Yonder? As reg’lar as pees in a pot, and twice as salient. But grits…? Now, that’s the foodstuff that separates Rebs from Yanks, and cows from corn. In years

gone by, every restaurant across the South offered not bacon but ham and grits, usually with ham gravy called “red-eye” (I think), any time day or night.

You can still order the ham, but these days you might have to ask for the grits. In fact, North or South, I’m the only person I know who actually likes grits and eats them regularly--but at breakfast as a hot cereal, with butter, salt and pepper, Tabasco, and sometimes melting cheese. I guess the tiny soft core bit in a kernel of corn constitutes a single grit, but they make for a bowl of grits if you collect and steam enough of them. Grits have nothing to do with gumption or some other definition of “true grit,” of course, but newcomers still might have to grit their teeth

to consume a bowl!

Reading Black literature during college, I came on an expression in Ralph Ellison’s great and astonishing novel Invisible Man that instantly became part of my less polite vocabulary: a clever, no-account, shrewdly elusive survivor type was reckoned to be full of “shit, grit, and mother wit”—a tough, fast-talkin’ attitude buttressed by sharp native intelligence, and partly learned from one’s dear old mother, or a stand-in Mama like Dilsey in Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, who doesn’t just survive, but endures. (The Ellison and Albert Murray dust jacket photo relates in this way: “trading twelves” equals “doin’ the

[dirty] dozens”--that is, swapping elaborate crude insults, a verbal throw-down among streetwise hustlers full of sg&mw.)

One food fact our Mom claimed was that poor people worldwide, who couldn’t afford to eat meat much, have via accumulative wisdom learned to eat foods that combine to deliver protein to the body--beans and rice, beans and corn, other vegie combos. So as I was eating grits for breakfast the other morning, I had a vision for a means by which to enlighten the world to the pleasures of corn bits. Some flashy

high-end New Orleans or Tex-Mex restaurants should introduce the opening-salvo appetizer dish I’m calling “Chips, Grits, and Mother Wit.”

The recipe, should anyone care to experiment, requires a shallow casserole of grits, water, butter, salt, chopped onion and peppers (both the colorful sweet and gourmet varietal hot), topped by a mix of shredded cheddar and Mexican cojiba cheese, baked in the oven until bubbling and crusting

slightly, served straight from the stove with, not ordinary corn chips, but those dark, speckled-grain chips made more from Mexican beans than corn.

And that’s it, folks: good vegie protein--bringin’ the heat and the sweet corn grits, straight to your gullet and pleasure center. ("Grits ain't groceries"? Little Milton knew better.) Go on, take a dip!

Blue State Reds, Red State Blues

Isn't there something comically ironic about Right Wing states being "Red"? Which leaves the Lefty states to give you the Blues. But any adult person cognizant of history knows that the assigned colors in fact should be reversed. Maybe, but I did say "cognizant."

In this time of media-mogul control of the once independent and skeptical press, of search engines and social networks, wee speedy gadgets and short attention spans, even a partial working knowledge of history seems, if I may purloin a phrase, “a consummation devoutly to be wished." Yet any such possibility is rapidly receding into the past.

Wearing narrow-focus blinders tricked-up by evil terrorists, fighting hellishly expensive desert and mountain guerilla wars for which we are ill-equipped (no matter how spectacular our weapons and stalwart our soldiers), we are left with an economic Depression, a crumbling education system, a rising tide of random violence

everywhere, a stupid resist-all-taxes posture embraced by the rich and powerful (c’mon, you fools, these are just dues, the ordinary everyday dues you owe your country!)… and thus no money available for the nation’s needs. So in time-honored fashion (“Blame outsiders”) we now nurture a shameful animosity toward all immigrants.

Yet with so many streaming here from nations shaped by the former USSR, still we neglect the curious Putin puppet show enacted behind the tattered Rust Curtain--

with potentially hazardous developments reaching from the onion domes of Moscow to the steppes of Central Asia and the sub-zero wastes of Siberia. Did Reagan truly ring down the Iron Curtain? Or was it Gorbachev instead--and was he realist or dreamer? Or does the credit/blame actually belong to Stalin’s crazed policies starting back in the Thirties?

Who among the young of America now can discuss intelligently Hegel, Marx, the Manifesto, Communism vs. Socialism (that word the Republican’ts throw around so casually)? What about the Red and White Armies? Or Stalin outmaneuvering Lenin, Trotsky, and others, becoming the savage leader who killed more of his various peoples than the many millions of Jews, Romany, leftists, and others murdered by

the Nazis (that other word favored by our black President’s enemies)?

But enough. It’s easy for me to get wound up and start hollering these days. But... surprise! This latest addition to the blog is actually intended to house and introduce a love poem… or, rather, an out-of-love poem I wrote when my first marriage came to its bitter end, but couched in the language of the collapsing USSR, with lots of Iron Curtain wordplay and oblique historical references thrown in to keep things lively... suitable for another false Springtime in the Pacific Northwest.


Glasnost, with Fallen Angels

The thaw has breached us.
And now in our icebound Baltics
a certain freedom of movement strikes

the alders, as flights of rhetorical starlings
pursue their social revolutions.
Snow that lay like linen

now flows in rivulets
down the steps and sidewalks,
and dissident speech of crows marks

preparations for the May Day coming.
In all the withered-away reaches
of the state, suddenly

budding green workers arise,
throwing off the chains of mothering earth.
It is Progress of Spring all

over, again, the break-up of
our sovereign union, after the Fall

and Winter chill of years. In

this spirit of no love
and understanding, we brush aside
the dust of bitterness, shed

our heavy coats and, compromised,
walk carefully, negotiating each
step, taking the sun and air…

apart.

* * * * *
As I mentioned last week, a pinched nerve in my back is wreaking havoc. Blog posts will be more erratic than usual for the next few weeks. As a deejay friend is wont to say, Thanks for being out there.

I hope you choose to stay tuned.

Awaiting Godot

I'm feeling snakebit some. For the few dedicated readers of "I Witness," I hate not posting at least one new piece each week, but I now have a pinched nerve or similar problem in my tailbone region, which makes walking, sitting at the computer, even thinking consecutively... a bloomin' series of unpleasantnesses.

I hope to regain comfort and commentary soon, but for now I invite anyone with a residual interest in French Existentialism--so popular and so dominant on campuses in the Fifties and Sixties--to seek out and savor (with savoir faire yet) Adam Gopnik's so-cool assessment of Albert Camus and that circle of post-War Sartre-orial thinkers, said essay to be found in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker.

I came away from reading Gopnik wondering about something else, not mentioned but pertinent: Where did Irish expatriate, Resistence fighter, and knotty, stubborn, struggling novelist Samuel Beckett fit in to this no-exit, hell-is-other-folks crowd of strangers? Was Godot (and all that came after) somehow the result of that Irish-French contact?

I'll be here, waiting for answers. (I can't go on, I must go on.)

Loose Ends

Humans have brains, well-used or not, so the human condition adjusts to surprising coincidences, moments of déjà vu, sudden personal disasters our brains don’t see coming, and so on. Fictive or factual, a focused writer still can experience peculiar lacunae, from meandering tangents and inadvertent red herrings to complete writer’s block. Humankind writ large, single scribbler drawn small--we each and all learn to expect major change on one hand, and minor footnotes and loose ends on the other. An obituary written too early, a finale imagined too soon, an iffy outcome counted on... you'll probably be rewriting.

My pop-psyche maunderings are the result of added research or new developments relating to recent blog posts. I decided to mention them, briefly, via this latest chapter in the erratic saga (which has now exceeded 250 individual pieces):

(1) I wrote about record producer and Jack-of-many-trades Lee “Scratch”/“the

Upsetter” Perry a few weeks back as the man who introduced odd sound effects and spaghetti Western/Ennio Morricone stylings into Jamaican Reggae, especially Dub music. Perry is an international figure these days, 35-40 years past his creation of Vocal and Dub albums that quite truly changed the world of music. Pop culture tidbits--TV and movies, current events, World Music discoveries, hysterical, I mean historical odds ‘n’ ends--still inspire his songs and chants (which are semi-Rastafarian but only semi-lucid), and he actually won a Grammy finally in 2005 for Best Reggae Album, a strangely boring work titled Jamaican E.T.

But, then, the Upsetter has always pushed and hacked at whatever envelope he found around him. After a half-dozen years (1973 to 1979 or so) spent engineering and producing, day and night, in his own Black Ark studio--brilliant records

welcomed around the world--Perry suffered a major mental and physical breakdown; he scrawled bizarre graffiti on every surface in the studio, then burned his stranded Ark to the ground. (Maybe he actually believed he could escape the pressures of celebrity and overwork.)

Freed after a fashion, he became a citizen of the world, going where welcome, performing with whoever would pay him, functioning basically as a hired gun--or a Chuck Berry on tour (“I’ll need the cash up front, and a rhythm section that can take orders”). The Berry/Perry analogy isn’t so farfetched; both Black folk-philosopher-musicians wrote influential songs, proved they could go it alone if necessary, still expected everyone around them to jump on command.

Now imagine Berry deciding he could out-do Marvin Gaye’s Soul Music, social

commentary classic What’s Going On. “No Money Down” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” with multiple overdubs. Or getting down to it,“My Ding-a-Ling” in place of “Sexual Healing.” Well, Jamaican E.T. sounds like WGO with a cracked foundation and bats skittering in the attic--multi-layered voices, as extra-terrestrial as the mammoth, concave listening antennae tuned to inner and outer space, with “Scratch” rapping and rhyming and chanting, atop multiple newscasts, vocalists, telephone conversations, random talk, white noise, and buried somewhere some Reggaefied bass-and-drum beats. Minimalist music really, fumbling and stumbling over its own terms for success.

Back around 1972 he and King Tubby had created (Dubbed up) maybe the first concept Dub album, called Upsetters 14 Blackboard Jungle Dub, a 14-cut stereo

wonder, left, right, and center channels each playing a separate Dub version of the music, but blending like Jazz cats improvising their own lines on a set of chord changes. Perry pressed up only 200-300 copies, sold ‘em at a premium, went on to other things recorded yet unheard until Scratch attacked.

That was then, and the after-then. And now?

History… mystery… City too hot… E.T. not.

(2)into (3) More loose ends but I’ll be briefer; think Civil War(s) as the connection among them. Discussing Stephen Foster’s career in the piece examining “Hard Times Come Again No More,” I ignored the scores of songs (precise pun there), most only fleetingly played and then forgotten, that he wrote Between the States (as it were) for

that War effort. Like Ken Burns for his famous documentary, when classic vocalist Thomas Hampson needed arrangements for circa-1860s music, he called upon composer/fiddler Jay Ungar (of “Ashokan Farewell” fame). And Ungar made Foster’s “Hard Times” the repeating motif threaded through Hampson’s gentle, quietly evocative vocals, over the trio’s simple arrangements of those ballads (fluctuations of fiddle, guitar, and parlor piano), but including as well some high-stepping medleys of Foster’s popular minstrel-show tunes--recorded, that is, without the politically incorrect lyrics. Call it a civil approach to the wars between races, sexes, and States.

Bruce Springsteen’s new album seems to be predicting civil unrest if not outright war. Wrecking Ball abandons the Foster song Bruce was occasionally using among his list

of encores, and presents instead his own roll call of Hard Times (“Shackled and Drawn,” “Death to My Hometown,” “This Depression,” “Rocky Ground,” “Swallowed Up”) and juxtaposes them against a few songs offering the possibility of positive action: “We Take Care of Our Own,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “We Are Alive.” Even some contorted photos suggest the national agony. (Then again, Springsteen is also lamenting the sudden and too-recent death of his partner-in-fame, “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, whose snaky Soul-full sax occurs on two tracks only--a ghostly presence, but a welcome one.)

Still, this is Bruce the Mighty; the worst events can be saved by rock ‘n’ roll, always,

whether he must take on the persona of a Gospel singer reconstructing “This Train,” or assume the "Oirish attitude-like" of folk-punk band the Pogues, or pick up a gun to go after the banksters threatening his home. (These days, Woody’s guitar would read “This machine kills one percentists.”) The New York Times chastised Springsteen for becoming excessively Populist in this album. But I say: If not now, then when? Bravo, Bruce. As the title song suggests, “Hard times come and hard times go and hard times come and hard times go,” and so on, and on… until, just maybe, hard times and Civil War come again once more.

(3) The Civil Wars is (are?) also a group… that is, a folk-rock duo with a hot debut album. Also, evidently, a secure place in the heart (or wallet) of record producer T-Bone Burnett, who has used new tunes by the Civil Wars in both the 50th anniversary album of the Chieftains and the “Songs from District 12” imagined

soundtrack (only two of its 16 songs are actually used in the movie) for the top-grossing film in the world--this month, anyway--The Hunger Games.

But wait a minute! What’s this I see? Hmm... there are actually seven different bands overlapping from the Chieftains CD to the Games s’track--Civil Wars, Secret Sisters, Low Anthem, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Punch Brothers, Decemberists, Miranda Lambert with Pistol Annies--with sizzling-hot special guest Taylor Swift a sort-of eighth.

Gadzooks! Could this be another Liberal, Left-leaning lumpen-proletariat conspiracy against the rich and shallow, the shirkers and off-shorists? Or maybe an eyes-wide-shut deal Burnett worked to keep in the public ear and eye the country-folkish acts he manages or produces? (Slogan ready-made: "Hard Times come again, Hunger Games just ahead.")

Two different record companies; projects with only a broad Folk orientation in common; the same producer and a similar roster of young artists… What can it mean in this American Dreamland of embezzlers and immigrants, backstabbers and out-of-workers, face-bookers and far-siders, lyin' signifiers and scions of wealth?

From Jamaica to Jersey: too little civil discourse, too much uncivil war.

Hard Times... Come Again

To mark their 50th year in Celtic Folk music, the time-honored, mostly instrumental group, The Chieftains, has just issued a special album titled Voice of Ages, with T-Bone Burnett co-producing. Once again the “lads” reached out to various vocalists to shape further or complete the chosen tunes. But this time the aging, Paddy Moloney-led Chieftains asked young folk performers (including Lisa Hannigan, Punch Brothers, Pistol Annies, the Secret Sisters, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops) to sing and play older selections from the British Isles tradition. Yet if you examine the credits closely, you discover a few exceptions…

The Decemberists deliver a rousing version--almost a call to arms--of Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In.” The quintet called Low Anthem in contrast doesn’t do much with Ewan MacColl’s thoughtful but tame number “School Days Over.” And hot duo The Civil Wars wrote a new song for the occasion titled “Lily Love” that sounds as old as “Peggy Gordon” or “My Lagan Love.” But one track

stopped me cold and prompted me to write this post—Scotsman Paolo Nutini singing “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

“All right,” I said to myself, “a fine performance of Stephen Foster’s major work, his social justice piece in the guise of a beautiful parlor song.” But when I looked at the publishing info, what I saw was “Trad., arr. Paddy Moloney.” I’d say that’s a bit greedy, even if legally accurate. Yes, the copyright no longer belongs to Foster or his descendants, but anyone who loves the song or happens upon it during yet another recession/Depression, would I think resent Moloney’s cavalier and unwarranted takeover; definite echoes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and other copyright skaters. Why didn’t Burnett or the record label (Hear Music, and isn’t that the Starbucks music spinoff?) speak up? I can’t imagine any economic hassles lurking when the item is over 150 years old…

Foster wrote “Hard Times” in 1854; he was only 28 but aware of the peaks of his earlier successes receding. “Susanna,” “Swanee River,” “Jeanie,” “Old Kentucky

Home," "Camptown Races,” and other well-known sentimental ballads and minstrel songs and such, were already behind him. The nation was experiencing a recession (Foster too, and a separation from his family); there was a cholera epidemic in his Pittsburgh area and race riots in New York City. That year, minstrel show producer Dan Emmett put on the boards one "Hard Times," and busy fictioneer Charles Dickens (whom Foster had met back in 1842) serialized another. But the youngish pop songwriter didn’t need the elder pop novelist to inspire him; times were hard everywhere.

Foster rose to the occasion, producing lyrics that had a conscience rather than a broken heart, championing the poor rather than the rich, the “have-nots” rather than the “haves,” the 99 percenters with their noses pressed up against the glass rather than the one percent sitting enthroned inside—with his flowery language carried, and bested, by a graceful melody:

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor:
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.
[Chorus here, then:]

While we seek mirth and beauty, and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

There are more verses saying much the same, plus--following each four-line verse--this lovely, minimalist, personalized chorus reiterating sorrow and hope):

‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary;
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more:
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

Foster’s vocal works have suffered ups and downs—picked as state songs, but picked over as stilted and sentimental; sung one year by world-circling African-American

choirs, banned the next year as racist; his works grown so popular and familiar worldwide that they too quickly become “authorless” folk songs. But “Hard Times” avoids those issues and fastens on “the People United” as the best answer--caring and sharing and helping bear someone else’s burdens when trouble comes. These ideals (Christ’s own, for those who believe) seem to be beyond imagining for new-style racists-in-disguise, un-Christian fundamentalists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, and the sneering wealthy with their tax-avoiding accountants and private security forces. Whenever the economic picture or some social injustice sweeps the nation, or the globe, or now the Internet, someone busts out with “Hard Times”: revived, pertinent, comforting, back again.

The first recorded version came in 1905, an Edison cylinder from the Edison Male Quartette—haven’t heard it—but the first performance to be remembered was circa 1930 by the Graham Brothers, rescued from obscurity and made available on a Yazoo anthology CD titled after the song. (Variations found on this CD and other

rural collections—like “Hard Time Blues,” “It’s Hard Time,” “We Sure Got Hard Times,” “Hard Times in the Country,” even Elder Curry’s sung-sermon titled “Hard Times” as well—have nothing to do with Foster’s song.)

I can’t cite precise documentation but from the Depression forward there have been versions as diverse as--let’s say--Al Jolson and Nelson Eddy, the Sons of the Pioneers and Johnny Cash, the Robert Wagner Chorale and Thomas Hampson, fiddler Darol Anger (with Willie Nelson) and various American orchestras celebrating Foster as composer. (Two more who'd have done classic versions seem not to have in fact: The Blue Sky Boys and current fave Allison Krause.) But “Hard Times” really

came into its own around 1990 when American citizens began realizing that bankers and CEOs, lobbyists and Right Wingers had co-opted and consolidated the public-interest media and quietly taken over the nation (Clinton having delivered other Corporate Demos right into the system too), and the gravy train had already left the station.

Among the better (maybe just bigger-name) versions I know of since then: the McGarrigle Sisters for a Civil War songs CD, Emmylou Harris live, and Mary Black with and without De Danann; all beautifully sung, all a tetch safe. Rather than a lullaby, I believe “Hard Times” can exhibit steely beauty, and

become a rallying cry of sorts. For a tribute disc called Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster, the producers called on Mavis Staples, inimitable queen of Gospel Soul, and Mavis really soared—her rich contralto voice, subtle touches of melisma or note substitutions, and above all, her dynamics, the moments when emotion could break through… well, the excellent piano and guitar lines barely registered. Soul in hard times, thy name be Mavis!

Simpler but also worth examining are the versions recorded by Dylan (solo, on Good As I Been to You) and James Taylor (buoyed carefully by trio of virtuosi Yo Yo Ma, Mark O’Conner, and Edgar Meyer, on the CD titled American Journey). Next to the

mighty three, genteel Jamie turns stoic, subdued, close to affectless, while the players pluperfectly play on.

Meanwhile, Bob’s croak… I mean voice, has weathered, given up any pretense of innate musicality, become as cracked granite (occasionally chipped marble) rather than the grand cackle of his debut album and early performances, which startled the folk world squarely (or maybe hip-ly) into the 20th century. Here he sounds angry, tired, ironic, excited, determined… and still cool. In fact I would place this rendition--words and melody composed by America’s first great songwriter, sung (maybe “wrenched forth” would be more accurate) by the later

song master in as crookedly “straight” a manner as did occur for his much-dreaded Self Portrait tracks… yes, I would place Bob’s minimalist “Hard Times” right next to that tossed-aside masterpiece, “Blind Willie McTell,” his song honoring a different pairing of native geniuses--with the two performances together comprising the apex and epitome of post-Sixties Bob.

But the “Hard Times” continued. Early in 2010, at the star-fired "Hope for Haiti" benefit concert, big-voiced Mary J. Blige essayed her own soul-saving version, much in the manner of Aretha Franklin in her heyday--that is, start slowly, gradually wander further from the melody, scat sing a whole section, find the big finish. Solid vocalizing… albeit by the numbers rather than lived on the pulses.

And so to Bruce Springsteen: during the 2009 tour, in his street-smart, "Man of the People" mode, Bruce began featuring Foster’s parlor lament as the pause and lead-in to the rock-full-bore final section of each three-hour show. He stops the non-stop performing (and that’s just the mammoth crowd filling every inch of London’s Hyde

Park) only long enough to announce Foster as the composer and America’s job-loss plight as quite dire. Springsteen’s arrangement (yes, he claims that legal position too) does in fact change or omit a few words, and find a mild tempo and tune that free the rock within, so his claim is somewhat justified. (But of greater significance is the heart-pounding concert created that day, a splendid record, so to say, of the E Street Band at its unified best, before the recent, unexpected death of sax “Big Man” Clarence Clemons.)

We’ve gone the long way ‘round… to arrive back at the most recent major performance of “Hard Times,” that of Moloney’s Chieftains and Paolo Nutini. As I suggested above, there’s much to recommend about this CD, from the sheer exuberance of elder Chieftains and young Turk folkies, to the grand and varied set

list, from the momentary magic of several performances, to the deluxe digipak presentation. But I am hard-pressed to approve this “Hard Times” in its Moloney disguise: an Irish dirge opening shifts to a lilting, regular tempo and a Glasgow Scot (of Italian heritage maybe) singing Foster’s 19th century, genteel-American lyrics, the voice multiplied by harmony overdubs. There’s also an Irish harp bridge, and finally a Scottish pipes band marches the tune away; all told, an arrangement that overreaches, trying way too hard to match the times and casual grace of truly Traditional folk.

But Nutini does sing all four verses, so we get to hear the fourth, which is often omitted and which reminds us to consider a worst case scenario:

'Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave;

‘Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore;
‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave:
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

So… Stephen, Mavis, Bob, Emmylou, Bruce--you too, Paolo--answer me this: Why, oh why, can’t our Congress and Supreme Court just forgo all the hubris and learn to “sup sorrow with the poor”?